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The Educational Programming Language Logo: ItsNature and Its Use in Australia
Anne Mcdougall, John Murnane, Sandra Wills
To cite this version:Anne Mcdougall, John Murnane, Sandra Wills. The Educational Programming Language Logo: ItsNature and Its Use in Australia. Arthur Tatnall; Bill Davey. Reflections on the History of Computers inEducation : Early Use of Computers and Teaching about Computing in Schools, AICT-424, Springer,pp.394-407, 2014, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (SURVEY), 978-3-642-55118-5. �10.1007/978-3-642-55119-2_28�. �hal-01272338�
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The Educational Programming Language Logo: Its
Nature and Its Use in Australia
Anne McDougall1, John Murnane1 and Sandra Wills2 1Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia
2Australian Graduate School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia [email protected], [email protected],
Abstract: Although Logo was expressly designed as a Mathematical language for use in Education its early versions were very logic-orientated. With the addition of Seymour Papert’s ‘turtle’ the system became far more accessible to students and teachers. This paper explores some of the educational ideas behind its development and describes its first use in schools in Australia through reminiscences by two of the co-authors, Sandra Wills and Anne McDougall.
The paper concludes with a reflection that educational research has not been able to prove the educational benefits of a ground-breaking approach that empowered students with computers. However, many rich case studies of successful implementation by passionate teachers abound in the literature to provide inspiration to teachers working with the new digital natives.
Key Words: Logo, turtles, Logo in Australia, Lego Logo, constructivism
1. Introduction
Early in 1973 one of the co-authors, Anne McDougall, commencing a newly created
position as Research Fellow in Computer Assisted Instruction at the University of
Melbourne, set out to read every research paper then published concerning the use of
computers in educational contexts. She found accounts of innovative work with drill
and practice programs for learning, computer managed instruction, and some
preliminary computer simulation and modelling programs. She also found a set of
papers from a group working at MIT in the USA (Papert, 1971a; Papert, 1971b;
Papert & Solomon, 1971). These argued that most current work in educational
computing involved the computers ‘programming the children,’ and by contrast
suggested that students should themselves learn to program the computers to enable powerful learning through exploration of novel ideas, situations, concepts and
problems. These papers described a programming language called Logo, developed
specifically for this purpose. Reading them, and being delighted by their approach but
reflecting on the current state of computer hardware and software, she wondered
whether such an opportunity might be provided for students during her lifetime. Just
three years later, thanks to some extraordinary initiatives by two teachers in
Tasmania, her own students were using Logo.
This paper is concerned with the development and nature of Logo, and describes
some innovative and influential Logo work done in Australia. We begin by examining
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the educational concepts behind Logo—and its subsequent versions such as
LogoWriter and MicroWorlds.
2. A Language for Learning
The creation of a programming language of any sort is a complex business and the
province of a special elite in the world of programming. Yet the difficulty of the
creation of a language for fields such as business or mathematics, for which there is
an existing set of well-tried models, pales into insignificance compared to the task of
creating one for educational purposes: a space where a choice must first be made
between various pedagogies, all with their own built-in advantages and disadvantages, advocates and detractors, before even the form of the language is decided on. Nor will
the educational aim be simple. Is it to be a language to introduce the forms and
disciplines of programming itself, or is it to facilitate a more general development in
problem solving and analytical and logical thinking? Are we teaching computing and
its applications, or are we using programming for some wider educational purpose?
Looking back at the a-priori positions on the benefits that writing programs could
bring to students, we find a remarkable unity of spirit among the pioneers of
educational computing languages. Cynically, it could be argued that in the 1960s,
apart from some rather inflexible Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI), and some
(mostly non-interactive) simulations, writing a program was about the only
educational thing students could do with a computer. But the pioneers, and
particularly those with a hand in writing specialised educational languages, such as Kemeny and Kurtz who developed Basic, and Feurzeig and Papert, the developers of
Logo, were all convinced that great educational advantages would come from
programming a digital computer, although often for different educational and
cognitive reasons. Weyer and Cannara (1975, p.3) put it this way: “If … any ideas
which can be formalised may be studied concretely via a computer program, then, by
learning programming in full generality, students can learn to construct laboratories to
study any ideas they wish to think about.”
The decade that produced the first educational computer languages is now 50 years
in the past. With the singular exception of anything written by Seymour Papert,
looking back through the papers and reports leaves a distinct impression of teachers
striving towards goals imperfectly grasped, using computing equipment barely up to the task, and hampered by primitive translators, operating systems and input/output
devices. Yet the overall feeling is of high optimism, more positive than one finds
across the more recent literature. (Papert who had worked with Jean Piaget for many
years, knew what he was doing from the outset, and Wally Feurzeig and Papert,
working with Lisp at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT in the USA, not
only had an example of a language congruent with their educational ideas, but one in
which their new language could be written.) The pioneers, from their own
experiences, knew that programming a computer had educational benefits, and were
going to set about proving it to the world.
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3. A Language for Learning Mathematics
Feurzeig’s Logo group began with education and worked back to the form of their
language. Early Logo was very simple. Like Basic, it came with built-in editing and
file manipulation commands. If these are ignored, the 1971 version consisted of just
26 ‘operations,’ five of which accessed the calendar and clock, and 15 ‘commands.’ Most operations were concerned with program logic or list manipulation. An essential
part of the design was to produce a language of such simplicity that it forced users to
write their own library of commonly used routines, such as multiplication and
division. From such a library, complex programs could be built. “Ideally, by the end
of the course, each student would have created his own extended version of Logo”
(Brown & Rubinstein, 1974, p.10).
There is no mention of the degree of difficulty inherent in learning to program
generally, and certainly not in learning Logo, in Feurzeig’s papers. The entire
emphasis in The Final Report (Feurzeig et al., 1969) is on the difficulty of learning
Mathematics, and how Logo was developed to make that easier. The programming
language followed as a result of a specific educational need. The designers of Logo
intended it not only as a vehicle to express Mathematical ideas and make Mathematical concepts concrete, they saw it also as a meta-language in which to
express Mathematical thought (Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.5). Here is the origin of
Papert’s often expressed need to teach ‘thinking about thinking’ (Papert, 1971a, p.2)
and the decision to write a computer language whose primitives and predicates
inherently contained and expressed the mechanisms of logic and Mathematics. “Do
we give children the instruction ‘think!’ without even telling them how to think?”
(Papert, 1971a, p.4). The mathematical purpose expressed by Feurzeig is actually at
odds with Papert who is at pains to stress the general problem solving capability of
the language (Papert, 1971a; Papert & Solomon, 1971). Lisp’s origins in Artificial
Intelligence were supposed to support this (Evans, 1992, p.14; Abelson et al., 1976,
p.16), but no author we have read ever explained how it was to happen. The ‘Lo’ in Logo suggested ‘Logic,’ and the earliest versions of the Logo system
were written in Lisp, a list processing language. It is curious then that early papers
(Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.1; Feurzeig et al., 1971, p.1) make it clear that Logo was
“expressly designed” for the teaching of Mathematics. At that time there was no
Turtle Geometry, and indeed no arithmetic functionality beyond addition and
subtraction. Brown and Rubinstein (1974, p.3) flatly describe it as ‘non-numeric’.
Many of the programs in the Final Report on the Logo Project (Feurzeig et al.,
1969) seem forced, elementary and repetitive. Many from the primary level, ages 7 to
9, are examples of programs to reverse the letters in a word, print a set of consecutive
numbers or simply print strings. The first lessons did not involve writing code at all.
This did not happen until Lesson Seven (p. 67). In the secondary curriculum, many
essential elementary functions such as divide and multiply were written by the teachers and given to the students to try to understand (p. 215), the inference being
that students could not be expected to write these routines themselves. Johnson (2000,
p.201) found “The position that the programming environments themselves, e.g.,
Logo microworlds, would become the school mathematics curriculum has clearly
failed to gain the support of the educational system.”
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None of this suggests a language easily taken up by beginners and used for their
own purposes. Part of the reason has to be the use, initially, of recursion for all loops,
definite or indefinite. Recursion is, as Papert has said repeatedly, a powerful problem
solving tool (Papert, 1980; Papert, 1971a; Papert & Solomon, 1971; Papert, 2002) and
indeed it is. But then, so is calculus!
Papert’s work with Jean Piaget resulted in a passionate belief in the idea of
‘learning by doing,’ something he later extended to what might be termed ‘learning
by making things.’ Papert in particular has always insisted that Logo is designed to encourage experimentation, with students writing and testing their own creations.
Given this emphasis, it is difficult to understand the reliance on recursion at the
expense of a general iterative statement. We can find nothing in the early literature
that asserts that students can be expected to discover a recursive solution to a problem
on their own. All we can find are examples provided to students to explain,
understand, and adapt. In his seminal book, Mindstorms, published in 1980, Papert
states that “recursion stands out as the one idea that is particularly able to evoke an
excited response.” That might be so, but he devotes less than two pages to it,
mentioning it once more in the Appendix in the context of ‘circular logic’ (p109).
Brown and Rubinstein suggest that with suitable prior experience, students can write
their own recursive routine to traverse a tree, but these writers give no clue to their
success rate. They did find that “if a student couldn’t figure out how to write a function, we could not slowly lead him down the path to discovery” (Brown &
Rubinstein, 1974, p.43). Once acquainted with WHILE—DO in Basic or Pascal, or
even the primitive Dartmouth-Basic GOTO, students have no trouble in writing their
own indefinite loops (Murnane, 1991; Murnane, 1992). (See also McDougall, 1985.)
4. Enter the Turtle
Even allowing for difficulty in conceptualising recursion, Logo is not English, and in
its early versions Logo struggled to make progress. The cure for many of these
problems was provided by Seymour Papert. Logo is often associated specifically with
Papert, and particularly with his Turtle Graphics. He joined the project in January
1969 as a consultant (Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.1) and his invention of the Turtle and its
commands transformed the language.
A Turtle is a small robot which, when connected to a computer, can move and turn on the floor. At a stroke this eliminated the gap between entering a program and
observing its outcome, since the Turtle could execute a command as soon as it was
entered. It also solved the problem of students understanding what the command did.
While they might need to be taught the meaning of “TEST IS COUNT /SENTENCE/
1 (Feurzeig et al., 1971, p.45) they could easily appreciate what FORWARD 100
meant because it accorded with their own body actions and their natural language.
Turtle Geometry provides an immediate and meaningful environment for the
beginner.
Along with Turtle commands came definite iteration: REPEAT :N, relieving the
programmer of the need to write all loops recursively. A recursive loop can only be
executed by writing a procedure and then executing it. In keeping with the idea of
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observing actions as the commands were entered, you could now type REPEAT 4
[FORWARD 100 RIGHT 90] and watch a square being drawn. Note also the close
correspondence to English syntax. Once the Turtle migrated from the floor to the
screen, Logo became accessible and viable in any classroom.
5. Logo Comes to Australia
In 1975 Scott Brownell, a teacher in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, saw Logo at
MIT on a study tour and in a visionary move brought a magnetic tape copy of Logo
from Boston to Hobart to run on a PDP-11 mini-computer at the Tasmanian
Education Department’s Computer Centre (Richardson 1997). With a Commonwealth
Schools Commission Innovation Grant, he was able to recruit a Tasmanian teacher,
Sandra Wills, to extend into primary schools the work on computer awareness and
computer science already underway in secondary schools in the state, using Logo as
the vehicle. He secured a rare and expensive robot Turtle from the General Turtle Co.
in the USA. This was at a time when the telephone system was used to connect every
senior high school in Tasmania with a terminal to the PDP-11. Over the next few
years, Sandra would load the turtle into her car and travel all over the island visiting
the Education Department’s 300 schools. At each school the children would connect the Turtle and a Tektronix graphics terminal to a home-made modem to dial up the
PDP-11 in Hobart.
Figure 1: General Turtle Inc. robot (interface box in background) with Sandra Wills at the controls of the PDP-11 terminal, 1976.
The Logo project was instrumental in spreading computing, not only into primary schools, but also middle high schools because it changed people’s perceptions of
computing. At a time when the general population had never seen a computer nor
knew what it might do for them, the Turtle and the English–like Logo language,
399
particularly Papert’s geometric Turtle commands, dispelled perceptions that
computing was only for the Mathematical geniuses.
John Gilbert, originally from Hatfield in the UK but then working at the Centre in
Hobart, wrote a version of Logo in which a virtual turtle left lines of asterisks on the
screen to approximate the path the floor turtle was taking. (Wills, 1980; Wills, 1981).
In 1976 the Tasmanian group sent Anne McDougall this version of the language to
introduce Logo to her students in the Faculty of Education at the University of
Melbourne.
Figure 2: Virtual turtle tracks
Once personal computers were invented in the late 70s early 80s, Richard Miller of
the University of Wollongong in New South Wales wrote the first version of Logo to
run on the Apple][, specifically to drive the Turtles in the Tasmanian project. Wills, in
collaboration with Miller and Allan Branch, a Tasmanian engineer, oversaw the design and manufacture of a smaller and relatively inexpensive floor turtle, the Tassie
Turtle, which achieved a degree of accuracy and precision that had eluded similar
400
research and development efforts in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and could be run from
a 5.25 inch floppy disk on the Apple ][ (Richardson, 1997).
Figure 3: Primary school class in Hobart working with the robot turtle and Sandra
Wills, 1977
A number of schools and teacher training institutions across the country were now
using Richard Miller Logo and the Tassie Turtle to explore what might be done with
Logo. In 1981 Seymour Papert visited Australia. Arriving in Melbourne to speak at a
conference, he was moved to tears when he found himself in a room surrounded by a
swarm of buzzing, beeping robot Turtles (Richardson 1997).
Papert’s visit built on the pioneering work of the Tasmanians to inspire a generation of Australian Logo workers. The next few years saw the publication by
Australian authors of several widely used Logo books (McDougall et al., 1982;
Nevile & Dowling, 1983; Carter, 1987; Newell, 1988a; Newell, 1988b). Learning
Logo on the Apple II, by Anne McDougall and Tony and Pauline Adams, was
401
translated into German, French and Chinese. In Victoria, Logo was included as one of
the recommended programming languages for senior secondary school Computer
Science courses. A Special Interest Group of the Computer Education Group of
Victoria, OzLogo, was established, and a quarterly newsletter, POALL, was produced
and edited by Peter Carter at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.
Contingents of Australians attended, and some presented at three Logo
conferences, Logo84, Logo85 and Logo86, held at MIT. In the ensuing years Logo
leaders from the USA, including Hal Abelson, Andy diSessa and Brian Harvey, also visited Australia, to speak at conferences and to work with locals in several of the
states. Gary Stager from the USA did extensive work in teacher professional
development in Australia and Seymour Papert presented a memorable closing keynote
address at the 1990 World Conference on Computers in Education in Sydney.
A conference, Logo in Australia: Ten Years On, was held in Melbourne in 1985 to
mark ten years of Logo work in Australia. By then Logo use was being investigated in
many parts of the country, at all levels of education from kindergarten, where a
single-key version of the language developed by Pauline Adams was used (Adams, P.
1985) through primary (Wills 1985) and secondary (Squires & Sellman 1985; Clarke
1985) schools, to teacher pre-service and in-service education (Jones 1985; Nevile
1985). Selected papers from this conference were subsequently published (McDougall
1996).
Figure 4: Seymour Papert and Sandra Wills with Tassie Turtle robot at Computer
Education Group of Victoria Conference, 1981
Consistent with developments in computer hardware, new and enhanced versions
of Logo appeared from development centres in the USA. These included LogoWriter,
TurtleMath, GeoLogo, StarLogo, Lego TC Logo, Object Logo and MicroWorlds, and
investigation and adoption of these continued in a variety of school settings across
this country. Associated with the adoption of laptop computers in some schools, in
402
1989 the Australian Council for Educational Research and Liddy Nevile set up the
Sunrise Project—laptop computers in two pilot schools, Coombabah Primary School
on the Gold Coast in Queensland and Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne
(Richardson 1997). Children in Years 5–7 were each given a laptop computer with
LogoWriter. The entire curriculum was conducted and expressed by the children as
LogoWriter projects. Many schools emulated this approach, and LogoWriter and then
MicroWorlds were used in laptop initiatives all over the country.
A second conference, Learning in Logo Microworlds was held in Melbourne in 1996, marking twenty-one years, the ‘coming of age’ of Logo in Australia. The
Proceedings were published (McDougall & Dowling 1997) along with another book
of Logo-related research papers, Logo in Australia: Selected Readings (Oakley 1996).
The across-curriculum use of LogoWriter or MicroWorlds was associated with
increasing use of thematic and project work approaches to curriculum planning, more
collaborative, group and discussion work, and greater flexibility of timetabling
(Chapman 1997; Best 1997; Betts 1997; McDougall & Betts 1997; Costa 1997;
Kerwin 1997). As well as these cross-curricular applications, Logo use for
enhancement of understanding of concepts in specific subject areas continued, for
example in Science (Duncan 1997; Hopkins 1997), Mathematics (Yelland & Masters
1997), and as a stimulus for reflection about natural language (Dowling 1985).
Student competence in programming (Oakley and McDougall 1997) and issues in the teaching of programming (Betts 1997) remained matters for discussion.
6. Research
In Australia, as in other countries, many research studies were undertaken
investigating aspects of the use of Logo by students of all ages (see for example
Gibbons 1997, p.10) and in a wide range of settings (for example Hopkins &
McDougall, 2003). We will outline here several more distinctive topics studied in this
country.
Almost from the first, Logo has gone hand-in hand with Robotics, a natural
extension of Papert’s invention of the Turtle. Early experimenters often built their
own interfaces to run computer-controlled models constructed from Fisher Technic
and similar kits. One of the authors, John Murnane, built on ten years experience with
Lego TC Logo and internally constructed interfaces for the Macintosh Classic by Jon Pierce at Melbourne State College. He was particularly interested in investigating
recursion, as programming a robot in Logo not only requires it but provides a concrete
model for students to explore directly (Murnane & McDougall, 2006). He also used
Lego kits to investigate linguistic differences between using a written programming
environment and a graphical one (Murnane 2010). Debora Lipson built on this work,
concentrating on the mechanical design and construction of the robots, and providing
new insights into teaching the Mathematics of gearing (Lipson, 2008). Interestingly,
Lipson found confusing differences in the notation used by Mathematicians and
Engineers to describe gearing ratios. Meanwhile, Peter Carter, working at Plympton
High School in South Australia, was developing models in Lego/Logo to enable
students to explore some of the issues in robotic locomotion (Carter, 1990).
403
The use of recursion in Logo has been the focus of a number of projects. Murnane
and Warner (2001) illustrated examples where children with prior experience in
LogoWriter but without specific teaching about recursion, could have, but failed to
use recursion in programming. In fact, there was almost no trace in their algorithms of
them having encountered Logo at all.
The nature of some of the difficulties students have with using recursion in
programming were analysed by McDougall in her Doctoral thesis (McDougall 1985).
Anne was as able to show that young children can recognise, devise and interpret recursive structures and processes presented independently of the computer, in
pictures, stories and everyday situations in their experience. She used techniques
based on this finding to facilitate effective use of recursion in programming by
children of upper primary school age (McDougall, 1985; McDougall, 1990b). Pamela
Gibbons (1995a; 1995b) extended this work in a study of individual differences
among adult students learning to program with recursion.
Gibbons (1997, p.7) discusses the value for a researcher of listening to students
talking about their learning with Logo, and comments on students’ remarkable ability
to analyse and articulate their own thinking when they talk about their Logo
experiences. John Vincent, working with upper primary school children and
MicroWorlds found similar articulateness. He also studied individual differences, but
focused on the visually rich aspects of the technology and interaction of these with children’s writing. He found strong interactions, with excellent support for writing
development in some students previously considered weak in language skills but with
preference for visual communication (Vincent, 2001; 2002; Vincent et al., 2010).
The weight of international research suggests that programming in Logo, by itself,
does not teach Mathematics. Ross and Howe (1981, p.147) found that “the research of
the last decade into ‘mathematics through programming’ has been more encouraging
than discouraging, but only mildly so.” Students, unless specifically taught about
these points, keep Logo and Mathematics entirely separate in their minds, and few
teachers seem to work to overcome this, or do so with much success. Even Abelson,
Bamberger, Goldstein and Papert (Abelson et al., 1976, p.10) rather sadly remark that
“Logo did not succeed in displacing Basic as the almost universal computer language for schools.”
Despite encouraging results such as those with robotics, recursion and
visualisation, Australian research on wider use of Logo and its subsequent versions
has been consistent with the above. Tony Adams wrote “The Logo community has
never come to terms with lists, they are just too hard to manipulate. Unlike turtle
graphics they do not have a low entry threshold and for most applications a good
working knowledge of recursion is required.” (Adams, 1985, p.22). Pam Gibbons
adds, “Despite what I have seen in the classroom, I know that Logo struggles into
adulthood. …[I]t fights the perception that ‘real programmers don’t program in Logo,
that is, it’s just for kids; in a discipline where obtuseness and mystique command
respect, Logo is its own worst enemy.” (Gibbons, 1997, p.17) This problem has been exacerbated by a turn-around in one of Logo’s original,
fundamental, principles: keep the language small and have the student develop their
own set of useful procedures. This forces them to write most of their own material
and, the theory says, thereby understanding it.
404
Logo has been extended far beyond the limits any of its creators could have
imagined: the Computer Science of the 60s gave no inkling of the possibilities the
personal computer and object-oriented programming would bring. Logo, in the form
of MicroWorlds, is part of a full-blown multi-media/robotics environment and in
2014 is probably the only language that makes Cobol look small, or offers the same
invitation to write the same thing in so many different ways. Feurzeig’s successors
seem to invent a new command every time they have a new idea, even when existing
commands would seem to be perfectly suitable to the purpose. For instance, the MicroWorlds Robotics version adds a completely new, quite separate set of
commands to talk to the Logo RCX ‘brick.’ This leaves the existing, and quite
adequate, ‘Talkto’ protocol in the main body of the language and separates Lego
Robotics from the use of its rich array of logic. Redundancy in the language is
therefore rife, while it is axiomatic in computer language design that there should
only be one way to do something. On the other hand, the MicroWorlds Backpack is a
brilliant model of an object, though the language itself cannot really be said to be
object-oriented
Gibbons is correct: commercial programs are not written in Logo, and it was never
intended that they should be. Instead, it was developed as a vehicle for learning to
work with and physically model otherwise complex and difficult situations and
problems, making their nature visible, documented and testable. Automating the glittering array of operations offered by later versions does not materially add to the
educational possibilities, it just changes their nature. It may well prove even more
difficult to show the new multi-environments enhance learning and the general
curriculum than did the simple original.
7. Conclusion
Sadly, the weight of research concludes that Logo’s advocates have not demonstrated
the gains that exposure to its ideas are supposed to bring. That said, given the
enormous number of contributing factors, research demonstrating that experience
with programming carries over into written expression, problem-solving and clear-
thinking is inherently extremely difficult. Essentially the teacher of today is in no
better position than the pioneers, and is really just dependent on their own belief in the
promise that having students write programs will bring educational and other advantages, a belief shared by the authors of this paper. The pioneers of educational
computing knew that programming a computer had educational benefits and set out to
prove it, but at the moment, when programming has all but disappeared from the
curriculum, it seems that the world was not listening.
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